Nicolas Slonimsky: Maverick Conductor

by Carol J. Oja

In March
1932, as Hitler's National Socialist Party rode a steamroller to
power, a Russian-American conductor in his mid-thirties arrived in
Berlin with enough cash in his pocket to hire the Berlin Philharmonic
for two concerts of "ultramodern" American music. The
conductor was Nicolas Slonimsky, and the music had been composed by
Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Amadeo Roldán, Carl Ruggles,
Adolph Weiss, and Edgard Varèse. It was a time when concert
life in the German capital had "suffered from the
depression," as the journal Modern Music reported to readers in
the United States, and high quality players could be had at low cost.

The results
were extraordinary. The German musicians vigorously tackled a batch
of difficult scores, critics enthused about the brilliant young
conductor, and American orchestral works gained an audience abroad.
Slonimsky later proclaimed that these concerts "marked the
height of my achievements as a symphonic conductor."

Slonimsky's
Berlin concert was one of a series of events presented by him outside
the United States under the auspices of the Pan American Association
of Composers, a new-music performance society based in New York. All
represented strategic advances in the process of integrating American
modernism into an international marketplace. The others occurred in
Paris (two concerts in 1931, with two more in 1932), Budapest (in
1932); and Havana (two in 1933). None of the programs pandered to the
public but instead administered straight doses of ultra-modernism
from the Western Hemisphere. Often the music had recently been
published by Henry Cowell's New Music Quarterly or performed in his
California concert series, showing the interconnectedness of
modernist networks of the day.

This
was by no means the first time that the music of American modernists
had been heard in Europe. American music had been performed on
programs of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music)
since the early 1920s, and figures such as Virgil Thomson and George
Antheil had produced entire programs of their compositions in Paris.
But these events usually involved solo or chamber works. Mustering
the political and financial clout to obtain an orchestral performance
was a whole other matter.

Slonimsky
was in the process of defining a revolutionary identity for himself
as a conductor. After arriving in the United States, he had worked as
an assistant to Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, and in 1927 he founded
his own ensemble, the Chamber Orchestra of Boston, which was made of
up players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Four years later, he
brought the group to New York's Town Hall for the world premiere of
Ives's Three Places in New England, and he also conducted a New Music
Society concert in San Francisco. Slonimsky was climbing a summit
that conductors still find grueling: trying to forge a career as an
advocate for new music.

Then in
June 1931, Slonimsky tackled Paris, hiring local musicians for a pair
of concerts, just as he would do in Berlin the following year. All
this was underwritten by Charles Ives, although according to
Slonimsky this patronage was "to remain a secret." With
typical impishness, Slonimsky recalled in his autobiography that
"large posters were placed on Paris kiosques and pissoirs
announcing my concerts of 'Musique américaine, mexicaine,
et cubaine.'" The programs included Ives's Three Places in New
England, Ruggles's Men and Mountains, Cowell's Synchrony,
Chávez's Energía, and Varèse's Intégrales,
among other new works;"I had a brilliant audience at my first
Paris concert," Slonimsky recalled. "Composers,
journalists, painters, Italian futurists-all came at the behest of
the indefatigable Varèse." Although critics seemed
puzzled by the music, they raved about the skill of the conductor.
"We have, sans blague, just discovered America, thanks to a
Christopher Columbus resident of Boston," wrote the well-known
French critic André Coeuroy. "This Cristopher Columbus is
called Slonimsky. Retain this name. It is that of a young musician
astonishingly gifted . . . and a conductor of a promising future."

After two
more Paris concerts the following year, Slonimsky moved on to Berlin,
where his conducting was one again hailed. "No word of praise is
too high for the conductor Slonimsky," wrote Heinrich Strobel in
the Börsen-Courier. "This is a talent of the first
rank," declared Alfred Einstein in the Berliner Tageblatt.

Slonimsky
himself enthused over the Berlin experience, calling it "even
more exciting than Paris." He went on: "Never in my
unhappily brief career as a conductor did I enjoy such marvellous
co-operation. The virtuosity of the individual players was beyond
praise. . . . I had four rehearsals
with the Berlin Philharmonic, and never once did the players show
any displeasure with the music or with my conducting." He
recalled that the musicians were especially "amused and excited
like children when I unloaded on the stage an assortment of
multicolored Cuban gourds, that made the stage look like a tropical
fruit market." These instruments were used in Roldán's La
Rebambaramba, which turned out to be one of the orchestra's favorite
pieces. "They became virtuosos on the Quijada del Burro, the
jawbone of an ass," Slonimsky drolled, "practicing on it
some brilliant dental glissandos."

The Pan
American Association of Composers (PAAC), which sponsored all these
concerts, was one of a slew of new-music organizations that sprung up
during the 1920s-a now-legendary period when American composers
learned the benefits of organizing their efforts and marketing their
music. Henry Cowell took charge of the PAAC, extending the
pro-ultramodern philosophy of his California-based New Music Society
to the East Coast.

The PAAC
set itself apart by addressing itself "exclusively [to]
composers who are citizens of the countries of North, Central, and
South America." It reached throughout the Western Hemisphere,
trying to generate a sense of community among composers of diverse
cultures who shared one important trait: they were not European.

For
Slonimsky, the European concerts under the aegis of the PAAC marked
the peak of his career on the podium. In 1933, he was hired to
conduct for eight weeks at the Hollywood Bowl but ran into
resistance. Both musicians and audiences objected to the new
compositions he programmed, and he was dismissed before his contract
ended. "The word spread," as Slonimsky recalled in his
autobiography, "that I was a dangerous musical revolutionary who
inflicted hideous noise on concert-goers expecting to hear beautiful
music." After that, he continued to conduct occasionally, most
notably the premiere of Varèse's Ionisation in 1934. But with
the depression in full swing and the modernist movement challenged by
a growing populism, a conductor of radical scores was in little
demand. Soon after, Slonimsky turned his attention to musicology and
lexicography, where he gained fame both for his impeccable
scholarship and wicked wit. Most notable among his bibliographic
achievements were Music Since 1900, a compendium of documents
charting the rise of 20th-century modernism, and editorial
supervision of Baker's Biographical Dictionary.

Back in the
early 1930s, though, Henry Cowell had proudly declared that
"Slonimsky has done great service to American music through
having produced and conducted more works by original Americans than
almost any other conductor." On January 21, 2001, the American
Composers Orchestra will celebrate that achievement.

For further
reading about Slonimsky's conducting career see his wonderfully vivid
Perfect Pitch: A Life Story (Oxford University Press, 1988).

-Carol
J. Oja is author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s
(Oxford University Press)